Abstract [en]

In today's society, everything is expected proceed quickly, easily and smoothly. This also applies to websites on the Internet. When you visit a website, you want thewebsite to be easily accessible and you also want to find what you are looking for quickly. It is therefore important that the menu is easy to navigate. The menu is very important for the experience of the website, as you use the menu to navigate through the website. The menu will guide users through the website, will help them plan their actions, will determine where they are and will help them find their way back if they would get lost.In this study, we have created and designed a website with menus of four different types. Our study is based on a number of theories about cognition, perception,usability and effectivity together with theories about how to create a good menu. We will use these theories in our study to determine which of the menus is the most effective. To find out which menu is the most effective, test participants were asked to conduct a usability test. During the usability test, we tested the effectivity of themenus by measuring the amount of time required by the test participants to perform different tasks, as well as how many clicks were required and how frustrated the test participants became. Then, we compared how the different menus performed inrelation to each other. The test participants were also asked to respond to aquestionnaire where they subjectively described their thoughts on the menus.Our results from this study can be used as guidelines when choosing which type of menu to use on a website, where navigation is expected to be as effective as possible.Our results show that the horizontal menu is the most effective one of the different menus we have tested. However, which menu is the most effective in a given situation or on a given website depends on many factors, and thus, the horizontal menu is not always preferable to use on every website.